Baseball Page 855 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Albert Pujols is the latest Hall of Famer you’ll forget played for the Dodgers
The possibility of Albert Pujols returning to St. Louis to finish his career where he started it, this time as a bench bat for a Cardinals team that has title aspirations and Paul Goldschmidt at first base, was too good to be true....

We'll never see another Doc Gooden
You know you’re getting old when you remember Doc Gooden’s no-hitter with the Yankees on May 14, 1996. It was now 25 years ago — so long ago that the Mets have gone through multiple waves of promising young pitchers who ultimately disappointed: Pulsipher, Wilson, Isringhausen. Harvey, etc....

Uh-oh, Jarred Kelenic is off to a good start (and the Mets are probably stewing)
Calm down; it was just one game. (It was a damn good one, though.)...

Baseball players don’t know anything: Round 2,315,890
It doesn’t help anyone to act as if “you should get vaccinated” and “you don’t need to get vaccinated” are arguments that need to be treated as equal because of the archaic journalistic construct of giving equal weight to all sides of a story. Some stories have a clear right and wrong. YOU SHOULD GE...

Why are the Twins such a bad team in non-9-inning games? Like, 0-11 bad
The Minnesota Twins probably weren’t expecting to be where they currently sit heading into this season. Minnesota reached the playoffs in three of the last four seasons, and were looking to return once again in 2021 in the hopes of actually winning a playoff series for the first time since 2003. So ...

A long-awaited Matt Harvey return means a reminder of all the ‘what-ifs’
You were constantly reminded of what was, and led to pointlessly ponder what could’ve been. ...

Yanks hit with three positive COVID-19 ‘breakthrough cases’ despite vaccinations
The New York Yankees are dealing with a rather concerning off-field development — three members of their staff, who are all vaccinated against COVID-19, have tested positive… for COVID-19....

Why won’t anyone pitch to Yasmani Grandal?
In 2004, the most feared hitter in baseball was Barry Bonds. This mammoth at the plate hit .362 that season and reached base at an incredible .609 clip. That’s a difference of .247, one of the largest ever recorded. In 2021, Yasmani Grandal is hitting .121 with an on-base percentage of .372 — a .251...

Patrick Mazeika rewrites MLB history books (no, really) with walk-off fielder’s choice
Patrick Mazeika has had an incredible first week in the major leagues. It’s one thing to make history, but quite another to rewrite it entirely....

So is there anything actually wrong with the Dodgers?
No. Of course not. What’re you, new?...

The Reek in Review: L.A. Dodgers edition
You smell that?...
![Throwing a baseball 101 mph has consequences [Updated]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/bb98fed82027bec24c32025a48ba02ad.jpg)
Throwing a baseball 101 mph has consequences [Updated]
Baseball can’t have anything nice. Jacob deGrom, who was doing his best impression of Bob Gibson circa 1968 so far this year, had to leave his start yesterday with discomfort in his side. This was just days after he had a start pushed back because of discomfort in his lat. We don’t know if it’s seri...

Behold, a fun few moments of instant replay in baseball
Sometimes, instant replay is a real drag. It takes forever to review some minor call that doesn’t make that much of a difference anyway, the flow of the game is broken, and you wonder if we’d be better off without it, even if sometimes bad calls do get corrected, because even though they do, a lot o...

Rat’s more like it! Lindor hits game-tying HR, Mets stop playing possum and ferret out a win
Francisco Lindor is definitely telling a true story that half the Mets rushed up the tunnel from the dugout to see him and Jeff McNeil were arguing about whether there was a rat or a raccoon roaming the bowels of Citi Field....

Nobody wants Albert Pujols — nor should they (sadly)
The White Sox will not be adding Albert Pujols to their lineup, Chicago manager Tony La Russa said on Friday....

Albert Pujols’ career wasn’t supposed to end like this
Albert Pujols’ lifetime numbers are utterly staggering. He has 667 home runs, that’s more than Willie Mays. 3,253 hits, more than all but 14 players, more than hitting machines like Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn and George Brett. More than some guy named Napoleon Lajoie, who played 120 fucking years ago and...

Joc Pederson and the walk-off that wasn’t — womp-womp
Joc Pederson probably imagined this moment before. Down by one, two men on, extra innings at Wrigley against the old ballclub. The script was almost too good, and it was about to be finalized. All he had to do was mash a homer to win the game....

Baseball didn’t anticipate this odd rash of no-hitters, which there are more of than 'count' because 'rules'
John Means pitched this season’s third no-hitter on Wednesday afternoon in Seattle, except it was really the fourth, as Major League Baseball keeps finding out that whatever oddities are available to be achieved, someone eventually will achieve them....

Tony La Russa doesn’t know the rules and there’s no one to save him from himself, either
Is it bad when your manager doesn’t know the rules? If we try to be fair to Tony La Russa, this is the first season this ridiculous extra-innings rule was put in place with the NL not having a DH, and La Russa doesn’t manage an NL club....

What are the Giants doing here?
The baseball world was all gaga over the seven-game rumble the Padres and Dodgers put together in the season’s opening weeks. The part of the story that got lost and ignored is that they’re currently 2nd and 3rd place teams. It seems while they were eyeballing each other, the San Francisco Giants we...